Jenny’s date didn’t go so well. The wrestler had fingers that reminded her of boiled wax beans and, she said, his Spanish was insistent, as if he wanted her to learn it then and there over drinks.
“A sour something drifted from him,” she said.
My date, however, went in a different direction.
First off, she smelled of apples. Even in the restaurant’s dimness, she wore sunglasses. Maybe it was a trick of timing but it seemed to me that she would enter into a topic, say on the subject of newspapers, only when she’d put a large portion of food in her mouth.
Furthermore, when we were on the move, words came only when she could stop, stand, and penetrate the question. She would stop and say, “Well sure, let me tell you about that,” and she would stand and give me everything she could remember about “that.”
It was pleasant but took much time.
Our topics: butterflies, acronyms, ghosts, the future, the literature of post-war, her brother who, she claimed, disappeared in a flood, and her past and failed blind dates.
Strange sure. On the ride home (she would insist I come in for drinks, insist on music) she sat in the back seat. She said she had a taxi fantasy, fantasies of back seat transport, of deficit reduction, and on the way home she proceeded into the history of dating blind, years of bad teeth, ignorant insinuation, greasy food, groping from under the table and a mysterious gynecologist who would call her and load messages on her machine on the beauty of the Venus cleft.
Lastly, she said, “I’m sure I’ll find you just as interesting in the morning.”
From the back seat. On the drive to some apartment in the city, and I had yet to identify the color of her eyes.
